Vanishing Girls (12 page)

As for her, I say

Do not ask her to open her eyes

Before

She is ready to look.

As for her, I say

Do not try to reach her

Before

She comes to you.

As for her, I say

Overlook her, if you please

And

Resurrect us both.

I wasn’t a poet, or a reader of poetry, so I couldn’t judge its merits as art; it was short, and it was simple, and I had no idea if it was any good. But as expression it reached me: It was about the life Chali had left behind in India; it was her hope that Dathi’s childhood would not have to end as quickly, and harshly, as had her own. Every mother wanted the best for her children and Chali was no exception.

I gathered her neat, handwritten pages into a large envelope I found in a desk drawer. Dathi would probably like to have them, as she dabbled in poetry, as well.

To the tune of “Something” and then “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” I got to work.

First, I bagged a pile of things to keep: the envelope of poetry; three ornately hemmed silk saris in jewel colors of emerald, ruby, and gold; a beautiful barrette with an ornate design in turquoise and orange enamel; the prettiest of the throw pillows from the bed; a pair of traditional-looking leather sandals I suspected Chali had carried with her from home; and a small, worn Bible in which she had written her name in tiny script. These were all things I could pack up and send to Dathi as keepsakes. In addition, I put two wrapped Christmas presents, both marked for Dathi, into the bag.

I changed the CD to
Benny Goodman’s Greatest Hits
. As I sorted through the mismatched plates, glasses, pots and pans in Chali’s cramped kitchen, to the swing of Goodman’s clarinet, my mind wandered and I forced myself back to the moment, refusing all distractions from the task at hand, disallowing thoughts that wandered too far, and there were many.

The still unidentified dead woman on Nevins Street.

Abby Dekker, half alive in her hospital bed, under vigil of her parents’ priest.

Chali, soaking in a bath of her own blood.

Dathi, orphaned from afar, adrift in India.

Antonio Neng, the banker-hating stalker.

P-Patrick Sc-Scott.
Especially him
. I could not think about that man, and the sordid breadth of his comfort zone as he sought to
try something different
, without my pulse surging.

That was when it hit me: What Chali had endured as a child bride, what she had feared her daughter would also have to endure if she stayed in India too long, Patrick Scott’s taste for
something different
at the sight of eleven-year-old Abby alone on Nevins Street, stolen girls, the serial murder of prostitutes—they were all threads of the same pitiless knot.

I put my money on
him
: the double life, the guilty rage; johns’ infamous taste for violence toward the women (and girls) they both desire and detest. It was self-loathing misogyny in its purest form.

He
was the Working Girl Killer; I felt sure of it.

But if I was right . . . he was only one man. It wouldn’t solve the larger problem. It didn’t reveal how or where the missing girls had been trafficked, or why they had later been killed with such ostentatious violence. It didn’t solve the Dekker murders. And it couldn’t bring Chali back.

The thing was, even if Antonio Neng
had
murdered the Dekkers, and even if Patrick Scott
was
the Working Girl Killer—Chali wasn’t a prostitute. Yet she had been killed in the same manner as all the others. Where did
she
fit in to all this? It didn’t make sense.

Confused, heartbroken, overwhelmed, I leaned against the kitchen wall and slid down to the floor until my face was buried in my knees. I wrapped my arms around my buckled legs, and wept.

After a while, exhausted, I maneuvered to stand, and a glint of something caught my eye nestled in the corner of the floor where two baseboards met. It was a ring: Detective George Vargas’s silver bar ring. I picked it up and put it in my jeans pocket for safekeeping.

I changed the CD and continued working. Hours slid past. Mac was supposed to send Star to Open House to pick up Ben, which made me nervous, but I pushed it away. Changed the CD: Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons
. Continued sorting and bagging the rest of Chali’s stuff, either for Goodwill or trash, until the place was mostly empty except for the poignant scent of sandalwood over blood.

On impulse, at the last minute, I also threw into the bag I was bringing home the
Abbey Road
CD and the half-full box of incense, since I now associated both with Chali’s home, and once her front door closed and locked for the last time, home for her would exist only in other people’s memory. We’d have to carry it with us in small, intangible ways.

S
ince the Seventy-second Precinct was just four blocks away, I decided while I was in the neighborhood to pay Detective George Vargas a visit and return his ring. It was easier than packing it up and mailing it back to him, or playing phone tag until we could arrange a time for him to come get it. If he wasn’t in, I’d leave it with someone else in his unit.

The precinct was a squat two-story building at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Twenty-ninth Street, fringed with blue-and-white squad cars parked vertically so they could nose quickly into traffic. Inside it was like a lot of other once-modern, now-forlorn precincts, dusty and airless, milling with workaday cops and buzzing with that sickening combination of stultifying boredom interrupted by bursts of sudden activity. When I walked in, a pair of uniformed officers were leading in a new arrest, a shackled Latino kid, barely old enough to shave. I stood at the front desk beside them, waiting my turn to be noticed.

The boy eyed me. “You a law-yer?” The way he said it: splitting the word into two overly defined halves:
Law. Ya
.

“No.”

“Cop, then.” He scowled.

“Visitor.”

The desk sergeant finally noticed me. “Can I help you?”

After a phone call and a couple of questions, I was directed up the stairs at the side of the lobby and told to go to the second door on the left down the hall.

It was a kind of a conference room: long and low-ceilinged, with a table in the center and the cluttered look of long hours and possibly days of an unresolved investigation. The photos taped to the wall showed grim images from Chali’s apartment, intermingled with graphic pictures of her decimated body, sodden and gouged down the middle. I turned away; it was not how I wanted to remember her; yet, even without the visual aid, I couldn’t stop seeing her that way. My eyes landed on an easel in the corner of the room on which sat a dry-erase board charting elements of the case.

This was before I noticed George Vargas standing at the far end of the table, in the act of standing up, surprised to see me. Then my eyes adjusted and I realized that the woman seated beside him was none other than Ladasha.

“What are
you
doing here?” I blurted.

“You askin’
me
that.” Then she softened her tone as she, too, stood up. “I didn’t know you were coming.”

George came around the table, smiling, but it was forced. “Karin—”

“Schaeffer,” I reminded him.

“What brings you to our neck of the woods, so to speak?”

I dug into my pocket and brought out the ring. “Found this at Chali’s. Her landlord called me. I told you: He needs to rent it out. I just finished cleaning up.”

“Oh, right.” He took the ring and slipped it onto his pinky. “My girlfriend wasn’t too happy when she heard I lost it. Thanks.”

“No problem.” I looked at Ladasha, who stood with us now. The shadow of faded lipstick told me she’d probably been here awhile today, working without a break. At the other side of the room, three people pored over a computer screen, studying something, one of them taking notes. “So it’s official—Chali’s case and yours. I didn’t realize the teams were working together now.”

“We are and we aren’t.” She held my elbow and tried to steer me toward the door, but I resisted.

“Does that mean Chali’s knife matched the others?” I hated hearing myself say it that way: as if that gaudy, brutal weapon that finished off her death was
hers
.

“Thanks for coming by, Karin.”

“Where’s Billy?”

I twisted back to take another look across the room, but I would have noticed him if he’d been there; he was pretty distinctive-looking. What I did see now that I hadn’t caught on first glance was Billy’s name on the dry-erase board on a list with Patrick Scott’s and Antonio Neng’s, under the heading
POI
—persons of interest.

Suspects.

“
Whoa
.” It came out higher than my natural voice. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing, Karin.” Ladasha’s grip on my arm tightened. I shook her loose.

“Why is Billy’s name there?”

We faced each other, her large, dark pupils drinking me in, tiny red veins sprouting through the bright whites of her eyes like minuscule unreadable maps.

George leaned closer. “All you need to know right now is it’s a complicated case.”

“You can’t possibly think Billy had anything to do with this. Dash—he’s suffering from PTSD. You know that, right?”

George glanced sharply at Ladasha. “He is?”

“Seems like it sometimes,” she mumbled. “But on the other hand, the way he tunes out, gets all spooky and weird . . .” She stopped talking when George turned sharply and went over to the board. Using the tips of his fingers, he rubbed out Billy’s name.

“PTSD, man. That’s tough. A guy here killed himself over it last year.” George shook his head, as if disappointed, and looked at Ladasha. “I told you it was an out-there idea. I won’t be responsible for pushing another cop over the edge.”

“Sorry, I just thought . . .” Again, her sentence faded, which was unlike her. “All right, fine, we nix that direction.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t want to waste any more time.” George wiped his inky fingers down the front of his jeans.

It felt like a show improvised to appease me with the ending I wanted. But at the same time, I needed to believe they were willing to abandon their insane suspicions of my friend. I had known Billy a long time, and I knew him pretty well; he was not a killer. I was sure of it.

“You and Billy are partners,” I reminded Ladasha. “It’s insane dragging his name into this.”

“Yeah? Well, why didn’t he talk to me about supposedly having PTSD? I’m sitting there thinking the man’s going psycho on me every time we hit a crime scene. What’s with that? Why didn’t he just
say so
?”

“The stigma—you know it as well as he does.”

“Right. Uh-huh. So he keeps it to himself and goes postal every time he sees a body? Doesn’t even tell
me
?”

“He didn’t tell me, either. He only told Mac. I figured it out. You could have figured it out, too; actually I thought you had.”

“Huh.” She shook her head. Rolled her eyes.

“He’s getting help now, Dash. I put him in touch with someone. It’ll get better.”

“All I know is maybe you better not mention any of this to him. Not a good idea ’cause me and him, we still have to work together.”

It felt dishonest, but I knew she was right: Billy wouldn’t be able to handle the betrayal by his partner when he had already lost so much trust in himself. He would have to know eventually, but not now.

I left the precinct and walked quickly along bitterly cold Fourth Avenue toward the nearest R train. My mind reeling.

Billy, a suspect?

They may have erased his name, but I wouldn’t forget. In fact, they probably restored him to the POI list the minute I was gone. This was exactly the kind of thing he was afraid of: You show weakness, you crack even a little, and the vultures circle.

Chapter 11

I
got Ben dressed for school while Mac stirred oatmeal at the stove. We were back to our usual morning routine, which would have been a relief except that I hadn’t slept at all. The revelation that the
other
task force, the secretive
ghost
unit (as I had taken to thinking of it) at the Seven-two had its eye on Billy really threw me. I hadn’t even told Mac, knowing that it would upset him twice as much as it had upset me. I didn’t want him to experience any hint of the betrayal I’d felt a year and a half ago upon learning that my good friend Jasmine wasn’t who she’d seemed to be. I didn’t want Mac to suffer that same treachery because in his case, when it came to
his
friend, it wasn’t true. Billy was not only Mac’s best friend, he was a bona fide good guy. Nothing could convince me otherwise.

We ate, and I hustled Ben out the door to school.

The dissonance between the pre-holiday excitement crackling in the frigid winter air and the sight of Abby Dekker’s photo on every newsstand along Smith Street was jarring. “Will the Angel Wake in Time for Christmas?” one headline asked above a photo of a smiling Abby wearing a fairy costume and waving a toy wand at the photographer. Where had they gotten that picture of her? I stopped to look at it: She appeared about six or seven; that it was an old picture seemed just as off-key as using it to tweak people’s heartstrings.

Ben waited for me at the corner and I jogged to catch up to him.

A neighbor from my block passed us and smiled.

The Three Musketeers came around the corner and turned right onto Smith.

Somehow, life went on.

I gripped Ben’s shoulder to hold him back from crossing the street so I could turn and watch the three derelicts go along their merry way. Wondering why I thought of them as derelict when they always wore clean, new-looking clothing. Wondering why they bothered me as much as they did. Wondering if there was even a chance of seeing anyone, or anything, clearly when we were all lost in the subterfuge of our own misperceptions. I thought, again, about George and Ladasha and Billy. Pushed it out of my mind.

After dropping Ben at school, I abandoned plans to start packing for our trip to California, and instead headed to the Y for a yoga class. I had to clear my mind—or at least try.

I unrolled a mat and set up the usual props—block, strap, and folded blanket—in the far corner of the room. As I was about to sit down and wait for class to begin, I glanced through the half-open slats of the blinds on the glass wall separating the yoga studio from a cavernous basketball court one flight below—and thought I saw Billy. Prying apart two slats improved the view, and there he was, standing in front of a young woman with long russet hair pulled back into a ponytail. He had on the same sweatpants and T-shirt I’d last seen him in yesterday on his way to play basketball with Mac. The woman wore black leggings and a loose cotton shirt; she wore no makeup or jewelry of any kind, which gave her a compelling plainness. No nonsense: That was exactly what Billy needed right now. Their feet were bare and they faced each other, holding each other’s eyes as he mirrored her every careful movement. So it was true, he
was
trying to cope with his PTSD. To me, it was just one more confirmation of what I’d told Ladasha and George in the Seven-two conference room: Billy was dealing with it; case closed.

I sat down on the mat, on the soft folded edge of the blanket, closed my eyes, and felt a warm flush of release, like a thawed river, pass through my brain.

A little more than an hour later, as I walked through the sun-flooded lobby, feeling limber and relaxed and glad I’d dragged myself over here, I heard my name and turned back to the stairs.

“Karin!”

It was Billy. He was with the woman who had been teaching him in the gym. Both were bundled into their jackets and hats. “I saw you from the yoga room,” I told them.

“This is Mary Salter, my Tai Chi teacher.”

“I’m Karin.” We shook hands. Hers was soft and dry and I immediately liked her. Face-to-face she appeared taller than she’d seemed when I’d spotted them earlier, though she was medium height at best. She had a big smile, and oozed security and confidence. The warmth of her brown eyes was deepened by the dark shadows under them, and made her look older than I had guessed from afar. She wasn’t young, or particularly beautiful, but she exuded an undeniable prettiness.

“First lesson?” I asked.

“Yup.”

“How’d it go?”

“He did great.” Mary smiled at Billy.

“Don’t know about that,” Billy said, “but I tried.”

“Getting started is half the battle,” I said.

Billy rolled his eyes. “You want to embroider that on a pillow, or should I?”

“I’ll do it!” Mary laughed, and gathered her green knit scarf high up to her chin, as we rotated one by one through the revolving door into the cold. “Well, nice meeting you. Off to my next gig—I juggle three different jobs, with never enough time in between.” She waved good-bye as she turned toward Court Street. Billy and I walked together in the opposite direction, toward the Atlantic Avenue and Boerum Place intersection where a steady flow of traffic siphoned off the Brooklyn Bridge.

“You two make a nice match.” A little voice whispering in the back of my mind told me things would look better for him if he wasn’t perennially single; people tended to be suspicious of someone who couldn’t seem to couple-up. Mary was great. It was perfect.

“Karin!” But he was grinning and shaking his head.

“She’s awesome. Are you blind?”

“Actually, I
am
.”

“I didn’t mean that, and you’re only half blind, anyway.”

“Karin—she’s a single mother and—”

“So?”

“She’s gay.”

“How would you know that? You just met her.”

“She told me.”

“Oh.”

“
Oh
,” he mimicked, still chuckling. “See you guys after you get back from California.”

He kissed my cheek at the corner, and jogged off while I waited at the light to cross the street toward home. I deliberately didn’t turn to look at him, partly because I felt like an ass, and partly because I realized now why I’d made such an awkward stab at playing matchmaker: I was desperate to see Billy as normal and untroubled and unburdened. I didn’t watch him leave because I didn’t want to look at him any other way. He was Billy. Just Billy. Nothing had changed.

I
t was barely sweater weather on Christmas afternoon on Venice Beach. Jon and Andrea had bought a three-bedroom house on Appleby Street, a long walk or short bike ride to the beach where the cousins spent hours running around the playground or swimming or both. Susanna was eight now, David five, and with Ben about to turn four they were a high-octane trio. I lounged on a faded striped towel on the sand beside Mom, who sat upright on a beach chair—the long plane ride had done a number on her back—in a wide-brimmed straw hat. Andrea was splayed out on a low-slung chair at the edge of our umbrella’s shadow, the lower half of her tan legs shot out into the sun. Pregnant for the third time, her round middle glistened with oily sunblock between the scant parts of her bikini. She was more relaxed than I’d ever seen her. The beach was crowded today. I leaned forward and squinted at Mac and Jon jogging down the undulating dry/wet seam where sand met ocean, growing smaller the farther they got. It all seemed to blend together in the wavering heat: ocean, sand, sunbathers, boardwalk, palm trees, the graphic edge of a bustling town.

Susanna was showing the boys how to dribble wet sand into turrets on the sandcastle they’d been building for the past hour. She wore glasses now, which kept fogging up in the heat, and strands of her long blond hair blew across her face, but she ignored the obstacles and stayed focused on supervising her crew. She had evolved into the kind of smart, bossy girl any mother would be proud of. At one point, while Mom and Andrea discussed the prospect of shoehorning a soon-to-be family of five into a three-bedroom house (the third bedroom being more a glorified walk-in closet occupied by David), my mind drifted from Susanna to Cece.

She would have been nine years old now, had she lived.

I scanned the beach for a girl who looked the way I imagined my daughter would have, until I spotted a stalky brown-haired girl in the shallow water, mercilessly splashing a younger boy and laughing hysterically. There she was, and I was so proud of her for the split second before she was gone and I was staring at a stranger. Glancing again at Andrea’s swollen belly, I refused to think about my
other
daughter.

Shadows, everywhere, even in this blinding sunlight.

“I’ll put Susie and Davie together in the bigger room at first,” I heard Andrea saying when I tuned back in, “and set up the crib in the little room. And then, depending on whether the baby’s a boy or a girl, we’ll figure out who to double up for good later on.”

Her confidence that her new baby would arrive in due course and join their family thrilled me. Now that I’d experienced a late-term miscarriage, I would never be secure about a pregnancy again.

I refused that thought, too.

It was a beautiful day.

Ben ran up and threw himself into my lap. “We’re hungry!” Sand and salt water mixed with sunscreen had turned his skin to glop, but I hugged him anyway.

“Is it lunchtime already?” Mom asked.

Andrea flipped her wrist to see her watch. “It’s after one.”

“Time to head back to the house, then,” Mom said.

“No!” Susanna now stood before us, hazy in the brilliant sun, hands planted on her hips. “We’re not finished with the castle yet. We have
a lot
more to do.”

I liked her royal
we
, since she had mostly been supervising. She was a relentless crew boss without a drop of mercy for her workers.

“I’m hungry, too.” David stood beside her.

“I’ll tell you what.” I got up, bending to knock sand off my legs. “I’ll go back to the house and pack some sandwiches. You kids feel like a picnic?”

After a chorus of yeses, they raced back to their sandcastle.

Where the beach ended and the boardwalk began, I slipped on my flip-flops and started up Rose Avenue. A skinny man in a Santa hat, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, stood on the curb ringing a bell. He swung a collection can with a Salvation Army sticker at everyone who passed. I dropped in a dollar and kept going.

I couldn’t resist stopping at the edge of a crowd that had gathered around a band of drummers, five teenage boys creating an edgy, cacophonous rhythm so infectious it made you need to dance. Before long I was bouncing along with everyone else, dipping right, swaying left, nodding my head to the rhythm. And then I noticed one little girl, holding her mother’s hand and moving her whole body side to side, and couldn’t take my eyes off her though at first I wasn’t sure why.

She was around six or seven years old, I guessed. Her hair had been dyed blond, the recognition of which was the first thing that registered as off kilter; I had never understood why anyone would dye a child’s hair. She was dressed in white short-shorts and a snug pink halter top. On her feet were pink flip-flops, but instead of the usual flat kind they were wedges, elevating her height. She had a bright red pedicure, and her long hair was swept off her face in a too-perfect coif, as if it had been blow-dried. Large hoop earrings dangled from her pierced ears. Then I noticed that she was wearing a touch of mascara and a thin layer of pink lipstick, and my stomach turned. I thought of JonBenét Ramsey, the miniature beauty queen who was found in her parents’ basement in Boulder, Colorado, in 1996, on Christmas Day. She was six years old, and had been murdered in a brutal crime that was still unsolved.

I stopped dancing, stopped hearing the music, and moved away from the crowd. Continued up Rose Avenue. Along the way, I saw no fewer than three other girls who had been similarly dolled up to resemble little women—unsuspecting seductresses, attached to their mothers’ hands.

Why? Because this was Los Angeles? Where people famously came to get discovered for stardom? Or were all the precocious little girls noticeable here simply because so many people were out at once—a statistical certainty? If so, then why hadn’t I observed the same phenomenon in New York? I reminded myself that
of course
this place was a legendary magnet for stage mothers—it was, essentially, Hollywood—and reassured myself that there was no reason to feel so surprised.

I opened the front door to my brother’s house and stepped into the cool interior of the front hall. It felt good to be out of the sun. I always liked California the first week I was here before I started yearning for the East Coast again, with its moody weather and where unbridled cheerfulness is the exception and not the rule; but this time the longing seized me not two days into our visit. If it wasn’t lunchtime I would have made myself a drink, and for a moment I considered it before deciding it really
was
too early in the day. If I felt so vulnerable to every dark, passing thought, what I ought to do was give my old therapist Joyce a call. I had spoken to her once right after my miscarriage, and the conversation ended with a promise that I’d call again if I felt the need. So much had happened lately, it was hard to process it all, and the truth was that sometimes now I did feel that old sinking feeling coming on, pulling me into a dangerous, familiar quicksand. Maybe now was the time to make that call.

I reached into my shorts pocket for my BlackBerry, and was about to look for Joyce’s number when my phone shivered with an incoming e-mail.

I saw Dathi’s name. Everything else flew out of my mind.